Early Life
Stoudamire was born to Willie Stoudamire and Liz Washington in Portland, Oregon; he was the only child, with three stepsisters; his parents never married. Willie Stoudamire moved away to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to work in a brewery when Damon was seven years old. Stoudamire was raised by his mother, Liz, and his grandmother, Wanda Stoudamire-Matthews.
While Stoudamire was growing up, his uncles, Charles and Anthony Stoudamire, got him involved in sports, mainly basketball and football. They acted as fathers and personal coaches to Stoudamire in his younger years, as he grew up watching his favorite player, Nate Archibald, and attempted to pattern his game after his childhood hero. As he grew older, Damon began to play basketball at Irving Park in the Portland–Irvington neighborhood and at the Matt Dishman Community Center in Portland.
Stoudamire attended Holy Redeemer grade school (a Catholic school) and Harriet Tubman Middle School, then attended Woodrow Wilson High School. During his junior year in high school, his grandmother Wanda died of cancer. He would later tattoo Wanda's face and her address on his left arm in remembrance. He was accepted to attend and play basketball at the University of Oregon, but chose to attend the University of Arizona instead.
Read more about this topic: Damon Stoudamire
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)